The Atlantic: How New York Pay Phones Became Guerilla Libraries

John Locke thinks people should read more. So in the past few months, the Columbia architecture grad has slipped around Manhattan with a sack of books and custom-made shelves, converting old pay phones into pop-up libraries.

The concept, sponsored by Locke’s imaginary Department of Urban Betterment, is that New Yorkers will pick up unfamiliar titles while running their errands and then, perhaps, replace them the next day with favorite books of their own. That’s in an ideal world. Of the twoguerrilla libraries that the artist has fashioned, one has been used properly while the other has had its entire collection repeatedly ganked by sticky-fingered pedestrians. Its shelves were also stolen.

But Locke has many more libraries planned. With plywood consoles that slip over payphones as neatly as aprons, these sidewalk objets are endlessly replicable. (No doubt they’ll feature in his 2012 Columbia course, “Hacking the Urban Experience.”) I caught up with Locke over the weekend to ask him about what was and wasn’t working with these literary outposts, as well as why he started the project in the first place. Here’s what he had to say:

Based on your experiments, do you see the public-phone library as a viable concept?

The phone-booth conversions are part of an ongoing experiment that has not been perfected yet. But I think it can be. The response by people who see them and stop and wonder, What the hell is this thing doing here? has been totally positive, and that’s enough motivation to keep trying.

How did you get this idea in the first place?

The ubiquity of phone booths is interesting because they are completely obsolete, unevenly distributed in outlying neighborhoods and they carry a strong sense of nostalgia with me. They’ve already evolved from their original function as person-to-person communication technology into their second iteration as pedestrian-scaled billboards. I wanted to see if there is a third option in that, yes, they get our eyes for advertising dollars, but they can also give value back to a neighborhood. I was most interested in turning what is perceived as an urban liability into an opportunity.

And what more can you say about books? They’re the greatest things ever, and everyone should have more.